An accelerated sequential sampling for estimating the reliability of N-parallel systems

The problem of designing an experiment to estimate the reliability of a system that has N subsystems connected in series where each subsystem n has n $T_n$ components connected in parallel is investigated both theoretically and by simulation. An accelerated sampling sheme is introduced. It is shown that the accelerated sampling scheme is asymptotically optimal as the total number of units goes to infinity. Numerical comparisons for a system that has two subsystems connected in series where each subsystem has two components connected in parallel are also given. They indicate that the accelerated sampling scheme performs better than the batch sequential sampling scheme and is nearly optimal.